CITY LIFE

People

Building a small-town world

Cartoonist and library clerk Alex Nall

BY JACK HELBIG

Writers idealize themselves, spending hours at the computer, polishing their prose to make themselves sound better than they are. Cartoonists spend as much time, or more, to make themselves look, well, cartoonish. Lynda Barry erases her chin and hides her eyes behind opaque spectacles. Art Spiegelman turns himself into a neurotic mouse.

In his self-portrait at the back of his graphic novel Lawns , Alex Nall makes himself look middle-aged and balding, with awkwardly large black glasses and a very R. Crumb look of resigned bemusement. In life, the Nall who sits behind the checkout desk at his day job at the Oak Park Public Library looks younger, fitter, more open, and (more or less) happy with the way things are going. His appearance is utterly unlike the beleaguered, hunched over, clown-nosed version of Nall who appears in the pages of Teaching Comics, Volume One and its two sequels: Let Some Word That is Heard be Yours and Are Comic Books Real?.

So which is the real Alex Nall? Reading through Nall’s work—four graphic novels, Town and County (a semiannual 36-page comic book with three issues so far and more to come), and countless graphic short stories published elsewhere—it is hard to escape the feeling that the caricature is the real Nall, who only emerges in his cartoons.

By his own admission, Nall has been living in the world of cartoons for a long time. “I knew I was going to be a cartoonist when I was six years old,” Nall confided.

Nall’s current project is an epic fictionalized re-creation of the world of his youth: the people and events that made up small-town life in Illinois in the late 90s and early 2000s. He started with Lawns, his 2018 graphic dramedy about a town torn apart by a man who lets his dog do his business on other people’s lawns and the neighbors who demand the town’s ine ectual mayor do something about it. He has followed Lawns with numerous short pieces, some published in several issues of cartoonist Sean Knickerbocker’s anthology Rust Belt Review, others gathered in Nall’s own self-published Town and County

Nall said, “[My stories revolve] around a small rural town in Illinois, an unnamed, unincorporated township sometimes referred to as Township 828. There’s roughly 200 people that live in the township, and the goal of the series is to give every one of the people living there a story.”

On a wall near his desk, Nall has a map sketching out the topography of his fictional township and the towns around it: Clydesdale, Sandbag, and Maple. He said, “I’ve [also] got a Google Doc that has a brief synopsis of everyone’s story, but I haven’t completely worked it out yet. It’s a work in progress.

“The idea [for the series] was formulated over the years from reading books like Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. And the Palomar series by Gilbert Hernandez was also a big motivator,” Nall continued. “I love those kinds of world-building stories where you see characters weave in and out of each other’s lives and see how maybe one decision impacts somebody else.”

In his stories, Nall tells the tales of smalltown people for whom the thrill of living has gone. We meet Don, a retired widower, who spends his time writing short diary entries regretting his past and recounting his ongoing attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughters. There’s Sherman Snow, who has a decent job as the supervisor at the only grocery store for miles around, but still feels lost and unfulfilled. The characters Stanley and Luanne Pepper are a pair of empty nesters who used to be hot and heavy lovers but now barely interact. The problem: Stanley has been on a perpetual bender ever since the ball bearing plant he’d worked at since high school closed several years ago.

In one story Luanne hitchhikes to Bug’s Tavern in Clydesdale where she finds her husband drunk at the bar. Nall sums up their marriage in a line that could have been lifted from a country-western song: “He doesn’t ask her how she got here and she doesn’t ask why he doesn’t come home.

“Everyone says, ‘Oh, a small town, everybody knows everybody’s business.’ And I never felt that way. I always felt like everybody was kind of a mystery.”

The people in Nall’s stories are not unlike the ones Nall got to know growing up in North Henderson, Illinois, a small village in Mercer County (with a reported population of 162 people in 2020), 14 miles from Galesburg. Nall’s roots in North Henderson run deep. His father worked for a local road construction company. His mom worked at the post o ce.

“There were no stores in the town; there was a post o ce, a grain bin, a park, two churches, and an abandoned baseball field.”

Are Nall’s stories based on real events?

“There’s a germ in there. But whenever I feel like I could mine something [I’ve observed], exactly how it happened, I push away from that just because then it’s not fiction, then I’m writing somebody else’s story.”

Growing up, Nall had few options for entertainment. “We didn’t have a library, or a bookstore. I read newspaper comics. The Register-Mail in Galesburg had one page of comics: Peanuts , Garfield , Alley Oop , and Hi and Lois.” And then there were the cartoons on cable TV. “Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network. I was obsessed with Looney Tunes Rugrats Hey Arnold. Animation was sort of my bag for the first ten years of my life.”

In high school, Nall stumbled across the 2003 movie American Splendor about the eccentric independent cartoonist, Harvey Pekar. For Christmas he got Pekar’s compendium of cartoons, also called American Splendor, and became obsessed. “I loved how every story was drawn by a di erent artist, and that this guy literally, almost, starts every story with “Hi, I’m Harvey. I work at the VA hospital.” It’s pretty amazing that this guy can essentially tell the same story over and over, just tell a story about going to get bread, and it can be fascinating.”

Pekar’s work inspired Nall to do his own autobiographical cartoons, recounting life in high school. Nall changes his voice, mocking the tone of his teenage self: “Here’s our man walking the halls of United High.”

Nall went to college in nearby Monmouth and moved to Chicago “four days after [he] graduated” in 2012. “I’d say within the fi rst two weeks, I had a little mini comic, like a stapled Xerox I put together, and went to Quimby’s, Chicago Comics, Graham Crackers, and I just started doing the consignment stu . Really, it’s the reason I came here. I was like, well, I know for a fact they have three stores I could put my comics in, and I could potentially make some money.”

As luck would have it, Nall happened across the fi rst annual Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) soon after he moved to Chicago. “I had no idea about [CAKE]. I just saw a poster for it. Laura Park did the artwork and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I could go here and pass out all of my stupid Xerox mini comics to people I had been reading in college.’ That’s where I met Ivan Brunetti, Je rey Brown, Anders Nilsen, Gabby Schulz, and Keiler Roberts. I remember it was Roberts’ first time tabling there. I have one of her mini comics where the cover is just a piece of construction paper. It felt like, ‘I can do this.’”

Eleven years later, Nall is deep into self publishing. He and his wife, graphic artist Hannah Larson, run their own publishing company, Hardscrabble Cafe.

“I think one of the joys of self publishing is the amount of control you have over the project. And there’s some stories in my head that I know are going to take up a big chunk of the issue, and then there’s other ones that are just going to be maybe a page or two. And I like the idea that I don’t have to limit myself to making a big book or have a place to publish these. They can all just kind of go under this one publication.”

@JackHelbig